One of the biggest things I have come to learn about the severity of the trauma I have endured is how my body is in a near constant state of hypervigilance as a result. If you don’t know what this is, allow me to try to explain in my own words.

Hypervigilance is said to be a state of heightened alert or awareness of potential danger. Even if the risk of danger is low or non-existent.

It’s like being afraid that something extremely catastrophic could happen at any given moment and keeping all of your senses at or above 100% alert 24 hours a day.

I have difficulty trying to relax because I am almost always on guard. Enjoying a meal or coffee with a friend is so hard because I have to be able to see every entrance and every exit and see every person as they walk in to the establishment to identify whether or not they are my abuser walking in to make a scene. Even though that hasn’t happened in years! It’s still there.

Sleep escapes me often. I sometimes wake up in a panic perhaps due to a nightmare, or worse, a flashback and struggle to fall back to sleep. And if I do, I struggle to keep my mind from wandering back to what woke me up in the first place.

I still have deep emotional triggers and things that wouldn’t upset a “normal” person cause me to freeze up or shut down…or run away.

And trying to explain it makes me sound even more crazy.

I don’t want to be this way and I am working on getting better, but there are steps forward followed by steps backward and everything in between.

The other piece of this is how I analyze every single thing I do and the behavior of others as well. I am terrified of being hurt again. I am terrified to hurt someone else. I am terrified that I am going to push people away. I am terrified that I am not enough for anyone and that I will just spend the rest of my life alone!

There is a lot of anxiety wrapped up in my behavior. My boss might see that I am a workhorse, but really, it’s my anxiety pushing me to be “extra” so I don’t look like a failure.

I have a hard time saying no which makes me look like a go getter, but really, it’s my anxiety saying “if you say no, they will be disappointed” and thus starts a cycle of negative self-talk, followed by a deep depressive state and ending with crying for hours until I eventually fall asleep. It can take as little as a few hours to complete this cycle, but often times, it takes a week or longer.

My trauma runs deep. It’s not something I can fix overnight. I have been in counseling for almost 2 full years. And most days, I feel pretty great about where I am in this healing journey, but I beat myself up when I take a step or two back.

My counselor reminds me that healing isn’t linear and that I will have ups and downs. I hate the downs. Sometimes I feel like it would be better to put the mask of “everything’s ok” back on and pretend that I am fine.

I found myself with a pretty open Saturday a few weeks ago and for whatever reason was in a pretty deep funk. But the thing is, I had a pretty great day! It started off with sleeping in because I didn’t need to set my alarm for the first time in ages. Sure, I could have gotten up and gone for a run or taken a yoga class, but I decided to let myself sleep and allow my body to wake naturally. This is not something I practice often enough.

I woke up to a quiet house as my kids continued to sleep. I made coffee and wrapped myself up in my Buffalo Plaid plush blanket and sat quietly in my chair watching the leaves fall and listening to the wind as it played its beautiful symphony outside. I was able to enjoy an obscene amount of coffee while I did a little journaling and wrote in my planner. As each of my children woke up, I had the opportunity to talk with them individually about nothing and everything. My children are a treasure and I used to take mornings like this for granted.

After our conversations and some food, they retreated back to their rooms and I sat with the uncomfortable silence that followed.

You see…avoidance has been the key to my survival. Silence terrifies me. It allows me to process my thoughts. It forces me to face my feelings. As it turns out, I don’t like to feel my feelings because my feelings are scary. I have to be honest with myself when I feel my feelings. Having endured so many years in survival mode, I have realized that it’s pretty damn uncomfortable to feel. So I keep an insane schedule to stay in active avoidance because that’s what I am used to.

Silence always seems to usher in the funk.

I withdrew from the world that day. Most people know when I am in a funk because my texts become less wordy and lack emojis. That day was marked with few words and lack of response. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. I started missing my old life. The pattern and routine that I used to have on Saturdays with the kids when we had no plans. The cooking and baking I would do and projects I could work on. The long runs through the country roads we lived near. The piles of laundry that had to be sorted, washed and dried…the monotony of how it had been for so long. It was comfortable. I knew what to expect.

Except that I didn’t. All was calm until it wasn’t. Something would cause an anger storm and I never knew when it was going to be or what would cause it.

And I think, for a moment that Saturday, I sunk back into the anticipation of an unexpected storm.

When you have experienced trauma, your body remembers how you reacted to it. It is engrained in your nervous system, so while your feelings may not reflect the actual feelings of the moment, your body goes into survival mode or how you reacted when those scenarios were happening.

Anxiety hits and pummels you until you are all but black and blue on the surface. But it remains unseen. Almost as if it is internal bruising in your brain that only you can see and feel and touch. Anxiety quietly whispers to you. It lies to you. It tells you all the negative things that you have allowed yourself to believe for so long.

And as it continues to lie, it intensifies both in negativity and volume as it exaggerates those thoughts and makes things seem a million times worse until your heart is racing so hard you think you might just have a heart attack in that moment and you can’t take in a deep breath and oh my gosh am I actually dying and what are my kids going to do when they find my lifeless body slumped in the chair because I did something wrong again and deserve the awful treatment I have received and are they really going to care anyway because I know I am not worthy of anyone loving or respecting me and my kids just go along with what I say because I am their mom and they don’t need me or want me in their life and neither does anyone else because I am a nobody with nothing but an ugly face and used up body that was once a trophy to a person who I thought actually loved me but treated me like I was a possession because that is what I was to them and they had all the control over my entire life because I am dumb and incapable of making decisions and am not allowed opinions of my own or to have friends because if someone knew the truth of what went on behind closed doors I would ruin everyone’s life so I lie and say I am fine when I actually died many years ago fighting so hard to win the acceptance of someone who couldn’t stand to look at me and would not honor my body or choices or opinions and the fact that I don’t make enough money to give the family the lifestyle they deserve even though I practically killed myself for the companies I worked for so I could make the money to buy the house to pay the bills to buy the groceries to make the food that was only ok or maybe I added too much salt to the recipe today so they had to order pizza and left the table leaving me by myself to eat in silence and then clean up the mess that was made and then was expected to have a smile on my face and accept the fact that I am not a good person and everything is my fault and why do I even try because at the end of the day I just cry myself to sleep and label myself as a failure again for not being able to do all the things or be all the things that everyone expects of me so I beat myself for my lack of once again and promise to do better the next day….

All of these run through my head in the matter of seconds and these conversations go on and on throughout the day because silence is scary. I believed that quiet times would ultimately lead to the storm that I never knew when to expect. The calm is absolutely terrifying.

Except that it shouldn’t be.

I snap out of my negative thoughts and remember who I am. Where I have come from. And that I am no longer in such a situation. I am brave. I am beautiful. I am enough. I am worthy. I am loved.

I write these words on my bathroom mirror on occasion as a helpful reminder.

Anxiety is a liar. And I believed it for a long time and find myself believing again every once in a while. I know a lot of people who still believe the words that anxiety whispers loudly in their ear.

You are more than enough. You are beautiful. You are strong. You are brave. You worthy and deserving of good things. You really are. And so am I.

I struggled for a long time to even say words out loud that sounded as scary to me as the words I am about to share with you.

I have endured countless sleepless nights over the years. Most of these nights I would lie in bed wide awake, sobbing into my pillow or quieting letting streams of tears roll down the side of my face as I scooted myself as far to the edge of the King size bed as I could praying he wouldn’t hear my cries because I might have to explain why I was crying. It would be easier to just say I was fine because words often failed to come to mind that could accurately portray what was going on inside of me.

It is difficult to explain things you don’t understand yourself.

I remember trying to find the words a few times, but they were usually met with harsh criticism or blame or that I shouldn’t feel that way because it was stupid. I would end up feeling guilt and shame even deeper than I had already felt realizing it was my fault yet again for making him upset (because my sobs woke him up) or having these feelings that were wrong.

What was scary were the thoughts I had during these sleepless nights. My mind would drift to death. Always death. My death. His death. Just death. I should throw a disclaimer out there that I was never suicidal, but I would fantasize about him just no longer being alive. Or that somehow or another I would die so I could be out of this situation.

My counselor calls it “suicidal ideation”.

I called it “the only way out”.

I prayed that he would kill me. I didn’t want to suffer, though. Like a gun shot to the head or something quick and relatively painless. I had already suffered enough and I, as I saw it, had died a long time ago so why not finish the job and take me out physically as well? I was just going through life trying to keep the peace and avoid conflict…do the right things…say the right things…wear the right things…until the “right” things were no longer the “right” things all of a sudden and I was somehow supposed to know when right became wrong and vice versa out of the blue.

I prayed that he would just somehow no longer exist. But I didn’t want him to suffer either. I just wanted him to be gone if that makes sense. *And then this thought process would cause a downward spiral of guilt as well because why would I want anyone in my life to just not exist?! That seems like something a horrible person would think and so I would think I was the worst person on the planet….and all the other negative thoughts…and just dwell on them….and then depression and anxiety would hit really hard until I found myself so deep into it I was essentially a zombie!

And then we would have a “good” day or two. All was well. Peace. Harmony. Rest. (Not really, though…I was always on heightened alert. I believe this is called “hypervigilance”.)

It would go from “good” to bad again. And the scary thoughts about death came running right back. I almost think that each of these lows got lower each time they occurred and that my body would just eventually no longer be able to handle them and shut down.

Operating this way for years takes it toll on you for sure. Hiding it all probably made it worse. Believing that I was the only one who had ever endured this and telling myself it was all my fault and that it really wasn’t that bad anyway was most likely catastrophic.

I didn’t realize that rescuing myself was an option. I never felt like I was strong enough to get out of the situation. Strong enough to choose living over dying. Strong enough to see another way out.

And I wasn’t. It took a series of events and one person to tell me that they believed me to start the process of recovery. I am so glad there was another way out!

The one thing that no one really prepared me for was the overwhelming flood of emotions I would experience. I’m told the beginning phase was grieving over the loss of the marriage.

I laid in that King size bed in my parent’s basement for days…a bed I had shared with my husband numerous times over our 20+ years together. We loved that bed. It was like this magical bed where you literally didn’t move when you slept and when you woke up you kind of felt like you were in a whimsical movie where birds and squirrels would start talking to you soon…and you would speak their language. It was that refreshing!

Not so much during the next several days following my escape.

And so I laid there in that magical bed…my body racked with sobs and in a constant state of trembling. I knew my kids could hear my cries throughout the house. And I am sure this scared them, but this was how I needed to process the emotions I was going through. I am glad they were able to see me raw and vulnerable. Dealing with this situation not as the strong mama they had always seen, but as a woman who was broken and hurting. We all knew this was the best decision for our family, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt like hell.

Sobbing. Trembling. Sleeping. Coffee. Exhaustion. Repeat.

This was the cycle I would follow for the next several days. And I didn’t try to hide it. I think it was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to feel all the feelings I was experiencing. It was terrifying, but experiencing anything new is always scary in the beginning. So many years spent burying feelings that were invalidated at every turn…my feelings never mattered. They were wrong. My opinions never mattered. They were wrong. If my thought process did not line up with his. I was wrong.

So I became a huge stuffer of all things emotional. And what happens when you stuff it all in? Eventually, you blow up. I can’t say that I actually blew up over this, but I did make a bold, drastic move that to some appeared to be an impulsive move. However, it was one that I had been planning for many years. Being isolated and in a constant state of survival mode, I had been less than honest with friends and family and my support system was almost non-existent.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that I actually had a ton of people praying for me…watching this situation unfold over the years…worried about what the outcome would eventually be. Yet, they were all unable to step in and help until I was ready to receive that help. This is something I will talk about soon…that’s a WHOLE other topic all together!

Grieving the end of a marriage that I thought would bring me my “happily ever after” was so therapeutic and lead way to a brand new experience that I would later describe as FREEDOM. And freedom, when not truly experienced, is a scary thing to walk out. I think that has been one of my biggest struggles in all of this. No longer answering to anyone else and making myself priority #1.

My counselor always likes to use the analogy of the oxygen masks on airplanes. You can’t help anyone else until you help yourself.

So true.

A day I will never forget.  It was the day I chose ME.

It started out as an ordinary day.  I got the kids ready and out the door for school.  I worked a job that had evening hours and so I headed home for my morning cup(s) of coffee before heading out for a job interview.  A job that I am not sure I really wanted, but knowing what was about to happen in my life, I knew that a job that paid a significantly higher salary was something I needed to seriously consider.

The interview went great, but the events that followed almost seem like they happened either extremely fast or in super slow motion.  To say it was the longest, hardest day of my life would be an exaggerated understatement.

Earlier that summer after returning from volunteering at Kids camp with my youngest daughter, I asked my husband to go grocery shopping with me.  I had some things I wanted to say to him because it had been pointed out by several people that the way I had been treated by him was not okay and they were concerned with my well being.  It was time for me to face some fears and address the ugliness of it once and for all.  

As we drove home from the grocery store, I turned the volume down on the radio, looked at him and told him that I was afraid of him.

I remember a small sigh escaping his mouth followed by the words, “You shouldn’t be.”  He turned the volume back on.  Discussion over.  That’s how it was with him.  When he was done with the conversation, it was over.  

From that night, I began having frightening panic attacks in the middle of the night and I had no idea why.  I found myself sleeping curled up tightly in a ball, and then waking up feeling like I was having a heart attack and gasping for air every night.  Most nights I cried myself to sleep and he had no idea.  A stranger in the bed next to me. 

It wasn’t until I started seeing a counselor in the fall that I realized why the panic attacks had started. 

Fast forward to the fall counseling sessions and the significance of this date.  My counselor told me I had Complex PTSD, severe clinical depression, an anxiety disorder and that I needed to create an escape plan.  I was clearly afraid of the man I married almost 20 years earlier and I needed to escape the situation before it could become any worse.

I became aware of the severity of his negative actions towards me and found myself withdrawing from him knowing that I would be leaving soon.  You can imagine that this caused a lot of tension and there was a confrontation that lead me to escape earlier than I had planned out with my counselor.

Immediately following that confrontation, I picked the kids up from school, ran home and grabbed a few necessary things from the house and drove 500+ miles to my parent’s house.  I left him a note informing him that I was leaving, the kids were safe and we were going to stay with them for a short amount of time.

I chose to go from victim to survivor that day.

I plan on sharing my story in bits and pieces here along with anxiety filled funny stories of my life to break up the seriousness of this.  I am not a serious person by nature so being here and typing this out is quite outside my comfort zone. It is my intent to talk about myself and what I have learned about myself during my 43 years on this earth.  I wish to not speak ugly of my abuser, but I will post my truth.  And there is healing in speaking my truth. My hope is that by sharing the details of what I have been through, at least one woman (or man) would be able to escape this similar situation.  

My heart hurts for those who have experienced domestic violence.  It’s not always broken bones and bruises. And it so much more common than we know.